Demonstration of 100 Gbit/s optical time-division demultiplexing with 1-to-4 wavelength multicasting using the cascaded four-wave mixing in photonic crystal fiber with a single control light source

Dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear (DF-HNL) photonic crystal fibers are useful for ultrafast optical signal processing. In this article, 100 Gbit/s-to-10 Gbit/s optical time demultiplexing with simultaneous 1-to-4 wavelength multicasting is successfully demonstrated by use of the cascaded four-wave mixing (FWM) in a 50 m DF-HNL photonic crystal fiber, for the first time. This scheme uses a single control-pulse light source only and a simple architecture. The wavelength multicasting of the time-demultiplexed optical signal is achieved on four wavelength channels of which two can have the minimum power penalty of 3.2 dB at 10−9 bit error rate compared to the 10 Gbit/s back-to-back measurement. With the cascaded FWM, our proposed scheme can be used to improve the functionality of ultrahigh-speed optical time-division multiplexed systems/networks so as to support wavelength multicasting applications in a cost-effective manner.